With the increasing demand for high-speed and large-capacity services in the mobile communication technique, radio data service equipped with high transmission capacity such as 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile communication systems has been provided. In compliance with this tendency, a femtocell which provides a service to a small number of subscribers at home or at an office has been proposed.
A femtocell is a concept contrasted with a macrocell which is a service area covered by one base station in conventional cellular mobile communication to cover a relatively smaller area than that of the macrocell. Generally, a femtocell base station which covers a femtocell is a very small base station installed indoors such as at home or at the office, unlike a macro base station which covers a macrocell. Further, a femtocell base station enables a mobile communication service area to be expanded, service quality to be improved, and the capacity of a mobile communication base station to be increased while enabling high-speed and large-capacity data transmission and providing inexpensive and various types of services by coupling with an existing network.
For example, a femtocell base station which covers an area having a radius of 10 to 20 m is installed indoors to be connected to a wired Internet Protocol (IP) network, thus providing various types of services coupled with wired/wireless communication using mobile phones or home networks. Further, since data can be transmitted from the femtocell base station to a mobile switching center without requiring a separate indoor repeater, network install costs can be reduced.
A femtocell can be installed and operated by a user, and therefore a femtocell base station is installed without any forethought depending on the user's necessity regardless of the design of cells by a service provider. Therefore, when a femtocell is additionally installed, self-setting of base station configuration and self-optimization of base station operations are required. Here, the self-setting of base station configuration includes initialization of the base station by generating radio environment parameters based on construction of the femtocell, and identification of adjacent base stations, setup and registration of the relationship with the adjacent base stations, and connection setup with a core network before the base station is operated. The self-optimization of base station operations includes controlling of a signal intensity of base station and calculation of optimal handover parameters on the basis of a signal type and traffic between neighboring base stations.
The newly installed femtocell base station needs to perform a selection of the frequency and channel and a control of power in an initialization stage so that interference with adjacent base stations, e.g., a macro base station located outdoors, can be avoided as much as possible, and also needs to be set so that femtocell identifiers are not duplicated for smooth handover.
However, the conventional femtocell base station establishment methods and apparatuses have difficulties to make a trade-off between effectively establishing base station information depending on the surrounding radio environment, and realizing the small size of a femtocell base station and keeping costs down, when the femtocell base station is installed.